Decluttering Your Website – When Having it All is Too Much.

One of the biggest problems customers can face with designing their website is the desire to have it all. From LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to Twitter updates and photo streams, employee blogs and charity microsites. The result is sometimes a cluttered jumble that doesn’t resonate with the online audience – in fact, it can drive them – and their business - away.

To be truly effective, choices have to be made that reflect the overall strategy of the website. Here are some tactics to help;

1)      It’s all about the brand. A customer’s online experience of the company should reflect the offline one. This starts simply, by choosing a color, typeface, and design palette that will be consistently applied to the stylesheets that are the basis of every page.

2)     If you can’t stay on top of it – drop it. Being able to connect with customers through their favourite social networking sites can give a company an important edge in online marketing. On the other hand, a stale link or an abandoned feature speaks much worse about the company’s online commitment than if they hadn’t featured the service at all. A Twitter box that hasn’t been updated in over two weeks, for example, shouts neglect.

3)     Make the perceptions of the customer count. By using feedback polls and other tools, the customer’s sense of a website’s level of online clutter can be measured and used for continuous design improvement. Instead of guessing what the user sees, discover it – and eliminate any possible disconnect. Not only does this bring important information back to the design team, but it tells the customer “your opinion matters.”

4)     Let the Design help with the heavy lifting. With effective design, a website can work for a company in many ways. For example, for a company that gets a tremendous amount of help desk calls on the same one or two issue, a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ (FAQ) page may seem like a logical answer. But how often do customers click on that page, faced with a free telephone number they can simply dial? A ‘Help Page’ cluttered with links to FAQ pages, online customer service chat, phone numbers, and store addresses is almost guaranteed to overwhelm the frustrated user looking for an answer. Decision trees can simplify the site by creating a series of questions and letting the answers drive the customer to the FAQ, or store, or other next logical step in the service chain.

5)     Be relevant. When choosing elements, tools, and tactics for a website, remember that less isn’t always more if what remains isn’t a good fit to the target audience. Stay in touch with what’s happening in the Web 2.0 world and how well it’s adopted in your company’s industry. For instance, if a company is made up of engineering professionals, then a LinkedIn profile on each of their webpages would immediately connect them to the greater community of engineers and the customers looking to hire them.

By working with technology-savvy designers, you can ensure that the choices you make bring value – not clutter – to your website.